I wish you could have met my Grandpa Jack. He was one of the most loving and kind men I ever met in my life. He radiated goodwill, the purest love and was generous of heart.
No one really ever knew he was shot in the leg on the beaches of Normandy, France during the largest military land invasion in world history. He compartmentalized that time in his life very well. He had every reason to harbor negative feelings towards the world and chose differently. It wasn’t until he was on his death bed that this information came out when I found the purple heart issued to him that he had hidden. He refused to talk about it with me.
My Grandpa Jack influenced me in many ways. I was introduced to grief at a young age when I realized how old he was and how he could be taken away from me at any undetermined time. I grew up choosing to appreciate the time I had with him and not be in fear about losing him. As a child of the depression, he taught me to pay myself first. Every paycheck I received, I was to pay myself by saving a percentage of my paycheck, with hopes for the future.
Grandpa Jack has been dead for 22 years and I am reminded of the ways he chose to live love through his life, especially in the face of negative circumstances. I miss him and I miss my father.
Life After Doom, by Brian McLaren
I am in the middle of reading the book, Life After Doom, by Brian McLaren. He addresses grief, hope, despair and love so eloquently. Focusing on the choices we can make to see the beauty even when life feels hopeless. I am going to put my own spin on these concepts as it relates to the life I am currently living. It’s important mentioning his book because I will use a lot of his words as it gives me much inspiration. I would recommend you all to pick it up and give it a read.
Grief
You would think that after about 20 years of hospice volunteer work, I would have some grasp on how grief operates. Right?!?! The truth of the matter is that grief works on its own terms. We cannot control how or when grief decides to show up.
The last several years has been full of grief and loss. Shunned, pushed aside, betrayed, retired, dismayed, death of my father, moving, the flood of the century… All within a short period of time. But there were things that hospice work never prepared me for. The shock, denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and the eventual acceptance.
It is the bittersweetness of grief, through its purity, meaning and love that I am finding most valuable. I’ve personally been experiencing the aching of grief inside of me. There are times I wanted to numb these bitter feelings but, I didn’t want to miss the sweetness of grief deepening me, humanizing me and making my life better. If I shut grief down, I would shut myself off to love.
I have felt this sweetness one morning towards the end of my dad’s life. On a day I was visiting and sharing breakfast with him. The feeling of participating in the full cycle of life as my father asked me to shower and shave him. I felt the depth of appreciation for life itself and for being able to do that for him.
It is only in grief, in loss, where I can fully appreciate the beauty in life. It is only in grieving loss that I can experience the sweet meaning of the “fullness of presence”. It is only in grieving the loss that I can more fully feel my undying love for my life, and life’s undying love for me.
There is a philosopher Josef Pieper who wrote a book, Happiness and Contemplation. “Having counts for little or nothing”, he explained. “The rich man can own ten fast new cars, but appreciate none of them the way a poor child appreciates her one hand-me-down bicycle. It is not having that brings deep joy, but appreciating”.
Let’s continue to wake up to reality. The world that we so love is ending, dying, people being murdered by ignorance, earth’s resources being mined for convenience and profit. Shock and denial, blame and anger, anxiety and bargaining, and exhaustion and depression are the inevitable responses of our internal board of directors to the loss we face.
As we allow these powerful emotions to wash through and over us, we can learn to drop down into the sweet current of deep grief that helps us appreciate—to know, to praise, and more fully to love—all that we are losing, or all that may soon be lost.
Author Susan Cain says this about emotional development …
“When we tear up at that beloved child splashing in a rain puddle … we aren’t simply happy …
we’re also appreciating, even if it’s not explicit, that this time of life will end;
that good times pass as well as bad ones; that we’re all going to die in the end.
I think that being comfortable with this is adaptive.”
I think of the ongoing rainbows I see here in the tropics in Thailand. Will I be able to see them through the weight of grief? Or maybe I may notice them momentarily, but not really see their beauty so clearly. This is why it is important to feel all the grief. To stay with it long enough to feel its sweetness and deepen our sensitivity to see the agony and ecstasy. To shed the tears with each other and to break bread together… in praise, love and appreciation of what we call, life.
Capitalism in Despair
It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I think capitalism is the major cause of the problems we face in the world today. Capitalism is the economic story that is currently holding our global civilization. Capitalism acts as if the economy is the ultimate reality that guides the modern-day human story.
Capitalism try’s really hard to define who we are. Absent-minded consumers with creature comfort wants and needs that only the economy can fulfill. Capitalism thinks it can provide the ultimate justice, rewarding only the hardworking and punishing the lazy. It either ignores social injustice or makes false promises that it will resolve it. Capitalism takes no account of the environment. In fact, it has created, on its own, a subdiscipline called environmental economics, as if the earth and its resources were a subset of the economy. Capitalism induced environmental blindness.
The capitalist theology we inherited was perfectly designed to render us obedient drones, doing our part to extract natural resources, put them through industrial processes, and produce two things: waste and profit. A little profit for the majority of the population, while most of the profit goes to the small percentage above us in the economic pyramid.
Nobody really asked many questions about the long-term consequences of how we make a living. We didn’t raise ethical objections when we heard the cries of the Earth and the cries of the poor. Instead, we let our theology conveniently turn our attention to what might happen after we die. Rarely, if ever, interfering in all the rampant political and economic violence in this life, violence that was harming billions of people, all of our fellow creatures, and even the physical systems of the Earth.
Will our descendants ask why over eight billion of us were willing to let a tiny group of oligarchs make $100 trillion for themselves at the expense of … everyone and everything on Earth, present and future? Why weren’t we organizing a worldwide strike? Why weren’t we laying our bodies down on the driveways of oil company headquarters? Why weren’t we voting the “do nothings” out of political office? Why weren’t we acting like our children’s lives depended upon urgent action? How could sane people allow such a thing to happen?
The only rational explanation for our inaction, was that we all became brainwashed—a combination of religious and economic brainwashing. We have stopped acting as rational creatures, Homo sapiens. Being inducted into a religious money cult, a civilizational death cult; we have evolved into people who worship the big bronze bull of Wall Street with his shiny, pendulous testicles. We have become consumers who would rather die than disrupt capitalism.
American farmer/sage Wendell Berry says it well,
“No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it
can for long disguise its failure to conserve the wealth and health of
nature: eroded, wasted or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed
ecosystems; extinction of biodiversity, species; whole landscapes
defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up; thoughtless squandering of
fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores; natural
health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness.
Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the
destructiveness and therefore the profitability of war.”
If we can finally disentangle our identities from the civilization’s dominant capitalist story. We can only then begin imagining, embodying, telling and writing a new story. A story that gives us a deeper sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose, a story that helps heal the Earth, our fellow humans, and our fellow creatures rather than destroying them.
Having faced various scenarios of doom, will we find ourselves ready to live for something bigger than personal wealth in this life or personal salvation after it? In this new story, our life is not about us. It is not about us as individual humans, nations, religions, civilizations, or even as a species. In this new story, we are about life; life that is bigger than us, a life that goes on after we’re gone.
The Complications of Hope
Theologian and activist Miguel De La Torre captured one of the downsides of hope by saying this: “Hope is what is fed to those who are being slaughtered so they won’t fight what is coming.” In other words, unkind forces often use hope to manipulate us, rendering us compliant to their continued oppression. Hope can be a false promise, not just a lie, but a dangerous, and delicious lie. And the lie then becomes even more appealing when the only alternative we see is despair.
Thich Nhat Hanh, writing from a Buddhist perspective, addresses another danger of hope. Hope has some value, he said, “because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear.” But when we “cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment.” We bypass the present to dwell in a better imagined future, and in so doing, we bypass the joy, peace, and other gifts available to us here and now, including the sweetness of grief.
Rather than feeling the pain of our current situation and translating that pain into action, we took a long draw from our religious “hope-ium” pipe, sing songs about the coming joys of heaven, give each other all the unsolicited advice about being happy, and fall into a pleasant dream of blissful indifference.
Most people are willing to hear the hard truth from others, as long as they are to end on a hopeful note. Reassuring them that everything will be OK. They want to be left as happy in their relative complacency as they were than before they heard the hard truths. But here’s the catch: happy and complacent people don’t change. And people who don’t change are unfit for a changing environment.
Here’s the rub. Hope and despair can both relieve us from life’s uncertainty. We will either believe the outcome will be happy or we will believe that a tragic ending will be inescapable. Either way, the outcome will be predictable. When we believe things will turn out fine, we aren’t pressed to do or change anything. Because there is nothing we can do to avert a tragic ending, we don’t have to do or change anything either.
Just as hope can give you permission to return to complacency, so can despair.
Hope is complicated, and so is despair. If you’ve always thought hope was nothing but good and despair was nothing but bad, listen to environmental activist Derrick Jensen turn things upside down:
When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation,
we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse,
then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it.
I would say that when hope dies, action begins.
People sometimes ask me, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?”
The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold
in my heart the understanding that we are really, really f*cked, and at the same time that life is really, really good.
I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction,
and a thousand other feelings. We are really f*cked. Life is still really good.
Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive
how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable.
They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an
entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they
allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.
So, here’s the paradox. Hope is essential because it motivates. Hope is also dangerous because it keeps you from facing how bad things really are and responding appropriately.
People promoting and critiquing hope are both against the same thing: a foolish complacency. And both are for the same thing: wise action. That’s why Miguel De La Torre says that the best alternative to hope is not despair, but desperation, “because desperation propels me toward action.” He explains, “When I have no hope, when I realize I have nothing to lose, that’s when I am the most dangerous” to the supporters of an unjust status quo. With nothing to lose, I can risk everything.
The Motive is Love
In the words of spiritual educator Cynthia Bourgeault, “Our great mistake is that we tie hope to outcome.” If we can see a likely path to our desired outcome, we have hope; if we can see no possible path to our desired outcome, we have despair. If we are unsure whether there is a possible path or not, we keep hope alive, but it remains vulnerable to defeat if that path is closed.
When our prime motive is love, a different logic comes into play. We find courage and confidence, not in the likelihood of a good outcome, but in our commitment to love. Love may or may not provide a way through to a solution to our predicament, but it will provide a way forward in our predicament, one step into the unknown at a time. Sustained by this fierce love we may persevere long enough that, to our surprise, a new way may appear where there had been no way. At that point, we will have reasons for hope again. But even if hope never returns, we will live by love through our final breath.
To put it differently, even if we lose hope for a good outcome, we need not lose hope of being good people, as we are able: courageous, wise, kind, loving, “in defiance of all that is bad around us.”
In Conclusion – The Middle Way
I’ve been in Thailand long enough to learn how bottled-up people’s emotions are here. Mental health and caring for it, is considered a western thing. Therapists and practitioners are hard to find and expensive. Buddhism and its commitment to reduce human suffering is admirable. But does not train people in listening skills or how to express our feelings of grief / sadness in a healthy manner. So, people carry around their unexpressed and undealt with feelings, not wanting to burden their families, friends or workplace. Until someone snaps under the accumulated weight over time, and it all comes pouring out sideways in anger and rage.
The colonial civilization in which we live in today is a global capitalist one. Sometimes pressing harder on the manipulation of humans, other living creatures and Earth’s resources. Our current story is about domination and exploitation. Colonialism can only take us so far. As colonial capitalists, we learned how to exploit Earths chemical energies for profit. And we lost the ability to see the spiritual wisdom and energy passed down through stories, poetry, law proverb and prophecy. Just like fossil fuels, the indigenous wisdom has been exploited, to make a few people a lot of money and do a lot of harm. We need to bring back the lost wisdom from our indigenous elders.
Hope is complicated. Being a sensitive human on this planet I can feel the effects of people’s unexpressed emotions through their isolation and despair. I can feel the hopelessness around what to do next. As capitalism runs its final course through the witnessing of climate change and big bureaucracy’s exploitation of humans and Earth’s natural resources. The grief I experienced recently by being displaced by a major flood and the many life changes in a short time would make it so easy for me to get complacent and become indifferent. Yet I remain hopeful for change and being able to continue to make a difference for fellow humans during this next chapter in my life.
There is something else being asked from me, and I do not know what that is just yet. I realize my brain has been preprogrammed and even brainwashed with some rose-colored idea of what a good life is supposed to look like. These programs have been put in place by industrial – colonial – capitalist civilization. In this void, I remain committed to not return to complacency.
I know there are more indigenous perspectives out there beyond the colonial capitalist ones. Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in Braiding Sweetgrass “How generously they (plants) shower us with food, literally giving themselves so that we can live. But in the giving their lives are also ensured. Our taking returns benefit to them in the circle of life making life, the chain of reciprocity. Living by the precepts of the Honorable Harvest—to take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift”.
According to today’s capitalist society, I have been successful. Money has been my ticket to retire from my job at 55 and move to Thailand. Money has been the language I was taught and that I culturally embraced in my life. These teachings gave me a false sense of security, personal value and my admission to what society might consider the “good life”. Money has been determined to be necessary to thrive in this world in which we life. Even if money earning and spending practices are unsustainable and have unjust values.
One thing I am slowly realizing is the spiritual life runs on a completely different currency: love. Everything on this Earth has value, from the wildflowers to the mountains, to the oceans to the hummingbirds… and to the most forgotten, marginalized and vulnerable humans. This “love” is the sacred value, not wealth, social status, religion, gender, sexual status or citizenship. Learning how to love well is the ticket to the alternate civilization, family and ecosystem.
The civilization of God, Buddha, Allah, Mohammed, Jesus, Moses, Ghandi (and others) … is the civilization where love is considered the primary directive. First, we realize that every living creature is beloved… the fish, the birds and the wildflowers…. And especially me & you.